With the economy being the way that it has been, I wanted to take some time to talk about careers. While most of the local and state governments have been on hiring freezes, you are sure to be able to find a job with a city or county being a dispatcher. Dispatchers are considered essential personnel and have a high turnover rate, so agencies are more reluctant to look past hiring freezes in order to keep their dispatch staff at, or below, their full-staffing levels. While this sounds great and all, dispatching is definitely not a career for everyone.
While experienced people are preferred, there are many agencies that will hire you with no experience and put you through some on-the-job training. Each agency is different, but training usually starts with some classroom stuff… learning the computer system(s), city/county map layouts, radio procedures, and phone procedures. In larger agencies, you can spend 6-8 weeks in a classroom setting before even setting foot into the dispatch center. Smaller departments tend to speed you through the classroom stuff in order to get you into the dispatch center where you will sit beside your trainer and learn as you go.
The actual job of dispatching - whether it be for police, fire, or medical – is hard to define, as there is just so much that dispatchers do. The basic principle of the job is that you take phone calls from citizens, other agencies, etc. and then you log/prioritize each call. The more urgent calls, or in-progress calls (like robberies, heart attacks, house fires, etc.), get handled immediately. The rest of the calls usually get held for the next available unit, depending on priority (which is set up by each agency), with some calls being held for hours. This causes a lot of problems for the dispatcher having to speak to upset people that have called back because of being unhappy with the time delay.
Multi-tasking, or being able to handle many different things at the same time, is essential to being a dispatcher. To use an example, my old department usually had 2-4 dispatchers on duty at a time for a city with a population of 60,000. The city was also a big tourist destination, which would send the population upwards of 100,000 depending on the time of year. There were 10 phone lines going into the center, which would light up like a Christmas tree when an emergency happened. We would dispatch for anywhere between 4-20 police officers, plus 8 detectives, depending on the day/time. The city also had 6 fire stations, with a fire truck (equipped with a paramedic) responding as the first-responder to every medical call in the city, in addition to responding to structure fires, vehicle fires, etc. As you can see, when things get hopping, the 2-4 dispatchers on duty at any given time can quickly become overwhelmed.
All that doesn’t include the mound of paperwork and other tasks that you have to do. You have to quickly enter data into a computer-aided dispatch system, run queries for warrants, parking/traffic tickets, officer/detective requests; and you have to enter data on stolen goods into the National Crime Information Center’s database. It seems that most agencies just dump all of the paperwork that they don’t know what to do with on dispatch, not really understanding the complexity of our jobs or the high level of stress that we have to deal with. Granted, some of the bigger agencies actually hire people to handle just this paperwork so that dispatchers can concentrate on their jobs, but most smaller agencies don’t have that luxury.
In closing, I’d like to reiterate that dispatching for emergency services is not for everybody. It is a 24-hour, 7-day a week, 365-day a year job. This means that you can be stuck working nights, weekends, holidays, etc. Many times, I have worked 11 days in a row only to have one day off, and then going at it again for another 8 days. I’ve also worked a 24-hour shift, and many 12-14 hour shifts. All this in a center that didn’t allow television, one where you were not able to actually leave for lunch, and one that had no windows to the outside. You have to learn how to work closely with many different personality types, so that you can work together to get your job done efficiently. After all, lives are on the line every second of your shift, so attitudes towards other co-workers have to be left at the door. I hope I have helped you to understand the career of emergency services dispatching. It can be a very demanding, yet rewarding, career… And one that will always be available no matter how bad the economy is.
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